adudley

Site's back up. But please, be gentle.

Hey gang - Andrew here, author of the article. Yes, apparently this news.yc post has brought our little site down. Working to get it restored. Who knew people would get so jazzed about a modified bed?

Yeah, this is actually an issue we've encountered with Tripeedo.

As a UI element, the calendar widget seems clunky and outdated -- yet if you don't know the exact date of your travel, it's nice to have a visual prompt. So there are cases where text input alone might not be sufficient. The user might need or want more guidance.

It's a challenging task to try to integrate both input mechanisms at the same time. We're exploring it though.

There's actually a lot more to it than that! For some services like Amazon and Yelp, we hook into APIs for quick retrieval/display of data. For others, we pull back data content from RSS feeds. And for others, like BestBuy, we do pass along parameters to their web services. It varies from service to service. But trust me, there's a lot of tech behind the app!

congrats!!

Thanks! We want ideas for future sites to hook into, so if anybody else has requests, feel free to post them here...

No, currently we only hook into the US versions of sites, but we hope to let people customize this in future releases.

sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com.

we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)

glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to implement).

agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.

very true.

thanks. yeah, we see potential for a lot of compatibility between Wundrbar and Ubiquity. Nick will have a blog post about that soon. but we also think we have distinct advantages in certain areas -- multiple distribution channels, execution on the server instead of the client, etc. so moving forward there's a lot we can do with Wundrbar that might not be possible with Ubiquity. stay tuned...

yeah, pegging means lots of things. to us, it means saving your search results. we don't mind if other people have more... exciting definitions for it. :)

pretty sure our pegging is better.

You're probably right, although currently a disproportionate number of our visitors ARE using Firefox, in part because of our toolbar. It'll be interesting to see how that trends over time...

But from a broader perspective, we want to distribute Wundrbar in as many forms as possible -- as a website, a browser extension, an embeddable widget, a mobile app, etc -- because people shouldn't be tethered to a single application or platform to get their information. That'll be a big difference between us and products like Ubiquity moving forward.

We'll be opening Wundrbar up soon. Not quite true open source, but close. Enough to allow a ton of scripting / hacking / mashing up. More news on that real soon...

thanks for the feedback -- we'll crank out Flash versions and post them soon.

All Startup School attendees and YC founders are invited to a Wundrbar shindig at our place in Palo Alto on Sunday afternoon.

Come mix, mingle, hack and share with other Startup School survivors. Light drinks and light snacks at the Wundrbar mansion, home of your new favorite search bar. We extend a special welcome for folks who are jazzed about Wundrbar, Ruby, or the idea of scripting the web.

Please check out our Facebook event page and sign up if you plan to attend.

Hope to see you there, -Andrew & Nick